Here's a good video explaining random projection. It's basically taking high dimensional data and reducing the dimensionality so that it's faster to process. I don't have any background in statistics but it was still intuitive to follow this talk.
I skimmed through the OP article, wasn't immediately obvious how they deduced that brain does something similar, but I would have thought better understanding of actual neural processing on a biological level is required.
That's not to say neurons/brains don't reduce data complexity to process it fast - I'm sure they do. But probably how exactly that happens is also important. Nature has had a long time to work this out.
https://youtu.be/V9zl09w1SGM?t=10m27s
I skimmed through the OP article, wasn't immediately obvious how they deduced that brain does something similar, but I would have thought better understanding of actual neural processing on a biological level is required.
That's not to say neurons/brains don't reduce data complexity to process it fast - I'm sure they do. But probably how exactly that happens is also important. Nature has had a long time to work this out.